The Witcher, Cyberpunk, Hadar: More Multiplayer, More Unreal Engine 5 – Your Opinion?

The big bang at CD Projekt Red was yesterday. In the strategy update, the Polish publisher looked many years into the future. Outlined was the successor to Cyberpunk 2077, the new Witcher trilogy, two additional Witcher projects from other teams, and finally the third major brand alongside Cyberpunk and Witcher, Hadar. Two similarities stand out.

(Much) more multiplayer

CD Projekt does not get specific enough about each of the projects, but a trend can be seen. The upcoming games from CDPR have significantly more multiplayer parts than before. For example, CDPR says: “Looking to the future, we now see three unique, strong and enduring brands. Each is centered on a growing number of single-player games with memorable stories, complemented by multiplayer experiences.” On a slide, CDPR shows a photo of Geralt and Ciri and writes: “Introducing multiplayer to most of our new games to enrich the single player experience.”

What connects CDPR with multiplayer remains very vague. Multiplayer is confirmed, among other things, with Project Sirius, the Witcher project by Molasses Flood, which is intended to appeal to a wider audience than before. There is still no confirmation for multiplayer elements in The Witcher “4” (codename Polaris) or the Cyberpunk 2077 successor “Orion”, which is being developed by the new studio CDPR North America. But it would be almost surprising if there was no multiplayer option of any kind. It could be possible that CDPR implements a kind of multiplayer light, for example by denying certain missions in co-op.

Unreal Engine 5 as base

Why CDPR is switching from the RED to the Unreal engine becomes clear at the latest when you look at the background video released yesterday for game development. CDPR clarifies that the switch to the UE5 helps to create the technological basis for online components of future games in the first place. The Epic engine was developed from the start to enable single player and multiplayer – that is unlikely to have been the case with the RED engine. The synchronization of the game state between players is “an integral part of the Unreal Engine architecture”. So CDPR has a “solid basis for the development of single-player games and games with online components”.

It is very likely that almost all new CDPR games use Unreal Engine 5 – only Project Sirius, Molasses Flood’s Witcher project, might still use Unreal Engine 4, since the project has been running for a long time and the developers use a lot of UE4 -Have experience. Otherwise, Canis Majoris, the Witcher game from an external studio with former Witcher developers, also uses Unreal Engine 5.

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